Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Irregular Warfare and the Dynamics of Violence on Panay during the Asia-Pacific War, 1942-1945

• Applicant: Dr. Kelly Maddox
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560733860

This project uses a substantial corpus of surviving Japanese and Philippine wartime and post-war sources to conduct a local case study of irregular warfare and violence toward civilians on Panay, one of the islands in the central Visayas region of the Philippine archipelago, during the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945). It adopts a multi-perspective approach, examining the complex relationship between irregular conflict and violence in a holistic, dialectic way. In doing so, it aims to reconstruct the first cohesive, transnational history of war and resistance on Panay. It examines military and guerrilla violence as part of a dynamic process of interaction, reaction and response and adopts a comprehensive approach to the analysis of such violence by exploring its strategic, structural and opportunistic forms. Through meticulous source-based investigation, the project aims to identify the factors which facilitated, mediated and/or shaped the ways in which violence manifested and evolved against the backdrop of the demands and pressures of ongoing irregular conflict on Panay between 1942 and 1945. It assesses this local study in a broader contextual frame of resistance and violence in occupied Asia to reflect on how this case advances the historical knowledge of the logic and mechanics of violence during the Asia-Pacific War. It also evaluates the findings through a wider comparative lens, tracing similarities and differences in the ways in which violence emerged and/or radicalised in Panay to draw broad conclusions that can contribute to the theoretical understanding of the complex relationship between irregular warfare and violence. As such, it will yield new insights into the causative factors shaping the broad spectrum of violence to which civilians may be subject within wars featuring irregular combat. The significance of such findings in view of understanding and devising strategies to constrain the violent excesses of conflict cannot be overstated.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants